Why? What a waste

[govcampbell]

Job a Sears goes well, after transfer to in-store marketing. No pressure to make sales now, just filling shelves and pricing. Managers like me. But then, I work a hell of a lot harder than those idiot teenagers they're currently employing at the same hourly rate. Don't know if this makes me dumb or more mature.

The waste part is this: Yesterday, I got to work, and the store was crawling with mucky-mucks. You could cut the tension with a bloody knife. The Managers were all closed up in the office, no one in, no one out. People are taking statements. People are getting called into the office. The senior salesman is running the store, becuase no one's answering phones in the managers office. Finally, people start emerging.

That's when the cops showed up.

And hauled away more than half of the staff of shipping/receiving. Four kids, ranging in ages from 16-22 (he was the receiving manager) the charge? 82,000 worth of merchandise, smuggled out over the last several months.

These kids are going to jail now. They've ruined their lives. I don't know them that well, I'm new, but I just feel so sad about the whole waste of it all. The wasted potential, the wasted dreams. What's ahead of these kids now? Nothing.

It makes me sick.

Comments

[govcampbell.livejournal.com]

That's an intersting point. I wish we'd covered more group psychology in my survey class when I took it in college, but it was more focused on development. I knew some of these kids, only marginally, but they seemed like nice people at the time, so perhaps it was some kind of peer reinforcement. I would like to hope so, given the scale of the crime. We've gotten some of the merchandise back (TVs stolen for personal use, mainly), and we're having a hard time explaining to customers the sudden influx of "returned" merchandise.